When Sonia Bonspille Boileau began making documentaries and TV series, she wanted to focus on positive aboriginal stories to try to counter the rampant negativity exhibited by most mainstream media coverage of aboriginal communities.

She made a series about aboriginal Olympic athletes. Another series, La Piqûre, allowed aboriginal teenagers to live out their dream careers for a few days. Then came the documentary Last Call Indian, in which Bonspille Boileau, who is a Mohawk from Kanesatake, explores her roots in that community, following the death of her Mohawk grandfather. It won the Diversity Award at the 2011 Prix Gémeaux.

Now comes her first dramatic feature film, Le Dep, which closes the Montreal FirstPeoplesFestival Wednesday and then opens in cinemas Friday.

It’s a tough drama about a young woman named Lydia (Eve Ringuette) and a troubled guy (Charles Buckell-Robertson) who spend a tense night in the dépanneur where Lydia works. He’s a drug addict who returns to their community in desperate need of four grand to pay off his dealer. It doesn’t give anything away to say things go seriously wrong.

It can’t really be described as a glowingly upbeat portrait of aboriginal life. There’s violence, drug abuse, tortured family history — precisely the kinds of themes Bonspille Boileau wanted to avoid earlier in her career.

“It’s all about balance on a personal level,” she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Aylmer. “I felt like now I want to go into something more deep. I’ve been doing this uplifting positive stuff for a while. I have another side I want to explore. I knew I wanted to work with these actors, because I knew that they had that dramatic potential. I didn’t feel we would be able to showcase their talent if we were to do an easy comedy or something like that.

“In the last few years, I’ve been much more active and aware (about) the social injustices …specifically the missing and murdered indigenous women. So I wanted to write a story about a powerful indigenous woman. To give richness to her character, I needed to create a backstory that, to show her overcoming it, has to be negative. But I didn’t start writing it thinking: ‘OK, I’m going to expose all these obvious social problems.’ That’s also why I invented a community, because I didn’t want that black cloud hanging over a specific community.”

It’s a given, sadly enough, that we still don’t see enough aboriginal stories on the big and small screens. We don’t even see nearly enough films with strong female characters.

“It was a struggle, even when I was writing, because my screenplay consultant and my producer, Jason (Brennan), they’re both men, and without realizing it, when we were talking about story and plot and characters, they get twisting it into the guy’s point of view,” said Bonspille Boileau. “I had to fight to make sure it stayed her story. They weren’t doing it on purpose.”

Le Dep is set entirely in the store where Lydia (Eve Ringuette) works. “I wanted to write a story about a powerful indigenous woman,” says director Sonia Bonspille Boileau.

Although Bonspille Boileau is Mohawk, she set Le Dep in a fictional Innu community, simply because three of the main actors — Ringuette, Buckell-Robertson and Marco Collin — are Innu.

“They kind of overpowered the fact that I was Mohawk,” said Bonspille Boileau. “If I wanted to make it as true to them as possible, I figured I’d set it within their culture.”

Le Dep is already shaping up as the little film that could. It was financed through Telefilm Canada’s Micro-Budget program, for directors making their first feature, and originally wasn’t even intended to make it into theatres. It was shot in Val-des-Monts, 45 minutes north of Gatineau, and to save money they used just one set: the dépanneur/gas station where all the action takes place.

The producers were planning on taking Le Dep to festivals and then selling it to a video-on-demand outlet. But then the Cannes Film Festival programmers came sniffing around, and they gave some serious thought to playing it. They didn’t, but that interest alone created some buzz, and that’s when distributor K-Films Amérique came on board.

Next, the Karlovy Vary festival in the Czech Republic, one of Europe’s more prestigious fests, selected the film, and it had its world première there in early July.

Bonspille Boileau and her colleagues are already surprised by how far they’ve come with the film. Mostly, she’s just excited that this aboriginal story is making some waves.

“In recent years, when you look at (the) Idle No More (movement), there’s much more awareness, curiosity. I think people are ready to see aboriginal stories in the mainstream,” said Bonspille Boileau. “Now, eventually will we be able to make stories that don’t have to talk about social problems? We’re not there yet. We’re still telling what’s wrong and explaining social issues in our stories. But that’s still progress when you think about it. When you look back 20 or 30 years ago, there were only documentaries. So now we’re telling stories, which is pretty awesome.”

AT A GLANCE

Le Dep screens at an invitation-only event on the closing night of the Montreal First Peoples Festival, Wednesday, Aug. 5, and opens in cinemas Friday, Aug. 7.

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